The Implementation of Standard I/O

GNAT implements all the required input-output facilities described in
A.6 through A.14. These sections of the Ada 95 reference manual describe the
required behavior of these packages from the Ada point of view, and if
you are writing a portable Ada program that does not need to know the
exact manner in which Ada maps to the outside world when it comes to
reading or writing external files, then you do not need to read this
chapter. As long as your files are all regular files (not pipes or
devices), and as long as you write and read the files only from Ada, the
description in the Ada 95 reference manual is sufficient.

However, if you want to do input-output to pipes or other devices, such
as the keyboard or screen, or if the files you are dealing with are
either generated by some other language, or to be read by some other
language, then you need to know more about the details of how the GNAT
implementation of these input-output facilities behaves.

In this chapter we give a detailed description of exactly how GNAT
interfaces to the file system. As always, the sources of the system are
available to you for answering questions at an even more detailed level,
but for most purposes the information in this chapter will suffice.

Another reason that you may need to know more about how input-output is
implemented arises when you have a program written in mixed languages
where, for example, files are shared between the C and Ada sections of
the same program. GNAT provides some additional facilities, in the form
of additional child library packages, that facilitate this sharing, and
these additional facilities are also described in this chapter.